Category: friends

This may be the last post I write. I’ve come to the end of it. And it’s all about a cat.

First of all, I see that my husband destroyed my character in all he did to me. And for a moment this made me feel really sad–I’m mostly beyond all anger. And then almost instantly I flashed in my mind to Seiji, who was named after Seiji Ozawa’s baton in a series of jokes that were going around my suite of roommates. How callous was I? you might want to ask. I think it was my idea. But since I didn’t know anything about sex you can’t really blame me. Sex was just a joke, and not a cruel one. Or maybe I WAS cruel. I don’t know. I guess that’s where this kitten’s sad tale begins.

I thought of him running with my mother’s pet wild raccoon raised from a youngster, who used to suck on its own dick. My mother thought this was adorable. I tried to think of a word for how this makes me feel and I couldn’t get beyond kakthrowup. Talk about inane sense of sexuality and insidious emotional cruelty.

Seiji was (like, later, Daisy) an obviously noble cat, a cat of fine bearing, I don’t see that he could be a purebred to be left by the side of the road like that, but he looked like one. More than this, he was protected by a British Lord, and a “head boy” (which is the same as senior prefect at an American boarding school) at Eaton; both then Fresh”men” like me, at “Hutton.” It is the British Lord who, through my latent British citizenship (or subjectship, I don’t know what the correct term for this be) that I worry about. Last I heard he was a painter north of L.A. He silently followed me, I am surmising, through my sorry career, giving a push here and a nudge there…for what happened to Seiji. And what happened to Seiji, happened to ME.

Maybe it gets more complex than that. I don’t know politics, social politics, and especially the politics of nobility and royalty in England, very well. (I feel him, the British Lord, shivering with intense relief, out in L.A., or wherever he do be, still watching. I have words for him that I cannot say here. And wouldn’t, because I don’t know my place.

And I don’t really understand the ins and outs of this. Before there even was a Seiji, or rather, an innocent little gray kitten that got stuck with that name, I went to the Freshman dining room for the first time, alone, and a gentlemanly looking stranger (the British Lord in question) sat down with me. “You have a posh accent,” I jerked out to his first sentence. He got up and moved away.

Was Seiji bait on a lure ?–I don’t think so but I’m just saying that maybe in the greater scheme of things it was quickly decided by the powers that be that I just didn’t belong at (Hutton) and that obviously I had to be gotten out or quarantined somehow. This English gentleman and his girlfriend, an Italian princess, were there at a Halloween party where I was dressed as the girl who went out without her panties on (you don’t want to know; but I was naked except for stockings from the upper legs down, wearing high heels and a red cotton blazer.) I was running for Dove Editor. arggghhh! The elegant young woman gave me her vote. (arggghhh again.) My high school, Wayland, was present in the form of an upper class”man” friend from their who had matriculated at Hutton ahead of me and her friend, not so much mine, who pulled me aside on the dance floor and informed me “You’re not dressed!”

I don’t know, I guess I’m not very good at telling who my friends are. That’s where I was at in Maryland. “Friend or foe?” I asked myself as I wandered through the supermarket with my little son. How deep it gets.

As I lay in bed moaning (see Bad Hot Dog Day) my old fiend Sally came back to me. I cried as I haven’t ever been able to. Tears from the heart, tears from the gut, tears, warm tears and now a little later I am up and I have the funniest feeling of warmth through my middle, as if it were busted for years and is now healed.

I see that there were both negatives and positives in each of these life-long relationships, that I was often misled in my naivety. I didn’t see that Sally was a competitor, or my sister; even my psychotherapist, who admitted that she felt insecure around me; I didn’t realize that she was jealous. Daisy was special, very sweet, but we had our negative moments and I wonder whether she took my mother’s attitude, they were friends, and kept a distance and a curious speculation about me. In all these relationships I placed great trust and in all of them it was broken; with Daisy it was broken by me.

Anyway a sickness can lead to insight. There was a Saint, I can’t remember her name, was it Julian of Norwich? who prayed for a great illness and found that one did come upon her and in her experiences of almost dying she saw magnificent visions of Jesus. And in my first semester in college, in a course called “Modern Intellectual History,” or something like that, I opted for the option to read novels about illness, and these have been very important to me throughout my life, especially “Tender is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I am finishing this post the next day, Monday. My illness continued throughout the night, and I slept and dreamed intensely all day today, missing an eye appointment. The next post, “Clan of the Cat,” was taken from this one, and wraps up this blog it seems; this blog continues from 5 years of writing online about life, psychoanalysis, my family, my marital family.

My last dream was about shit. Just like at the end of the novel August from 1983, about a psychoanalysis, which my psychotherapist had me read. I was sitting on a toilet in a lake, and the shit kept coming and coming. Sally and Ty and the rest of the old crowd were there watching. I filled up the whole area of the lake and then there was a thick dirty foam covering it. Obviously I was still sick. The foam wouldn’t dissolve or dissipate. I woke up remembering it plus the end of the dream which I have now forgotten; I went back to bed again after eating a bag of frozen mixed vegetables (microwaved), and laid down with my eyes closed but did not sleep as I was afraid to dream again. Now I’m up and feeling better.

Shit represents needs, an old friend from the state hospital once told me. The psychologist at the hospital in California told me I was suffering from too much “old shit.”

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